It is difficult to make a whip antenna working in a wide frequency range, for example from 138 MHz to 174 MHz. Although it is highly desired by standard mobile communication and public safety systems, seldom manufacturers around the world can supply such kind of antennas. Furthermore, if good matching is required, for example, VSWR=1.5:1 rather than 2:1, it becomes more difficult for the design and the fabrication.
Normally matching circuits as shown in FIGS. 1A and 1B are used to extend the bandwidth of a whip antenna. However, only 10 to 15 MHz bandwidth in VHF band can be obtained in many half wavelength antennas available in the market.
As summarized in U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,507 (OPENLANDER), many techniques have been developed to broaden the bandwidth of mobile antennas. However, these methods cannot obtain wide enough bandwidth and good enough impedance matching. For comparison, two methods are mentioned here.
The fist one is loading resistors and inductors to the whip. A good example is given in the published paper (IEEE Trans. Antennas and Propagations, Vol. 51, No.3, 2003, pp. 493–502). However, this method needs to cut the whip into two or more than two sections, and a matching circuit is still required, which complicates the fabrication. It has been shown that this kind of method can obtain very wide bandwidth, however, it is difficult to obtain good impedance matching.
The second one is to use coaxial cables with different impedances to widen the bandwidth. An example is Comprod Communications LTD's (Boucherville, Quebec) 148–174 MHz quarter wavelength whip antennas (Part number 572–75). In this design, coaxial cables with different impedances are used to transform the impedance of the whip to around 50 Ω. A tuning box is used to further improve the impedance matching. As VSWR=1.5:1 for the full coverage, this is the best commercial available product for this band. After carefully optimizing the cable lengths and junction capacitances, and tuning the matching boxes, VSWR=1.5:1 may possibly be obtained. However, in the production, it is found that the antenna performance is very sensitive to the cable lengths and junction capacitors. Furthermore, the individual tuning work is necessary and time-consuming. Hence it is very difficult to fabricate.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,507 (OPENLANDER) uses inductors and capacitors assembled inside a housing to extend the bandwidth. A toroidal inductor and a parallel resonant network are composed of one inductor and one capacitor. A metal shield is used to provide parasitic capacitors to the matching circuit. The circuit elements are directly soldered together and contained inside the cavity of the housing. Since the two inductors are close to each other, they are positioned carefully to avoid interference between each other and obtain consistent parasitic capacitor from the shield so that the antenna performance can be consistent.